Flowers and gardens

In art, flowers have stood for beauty and love, for faith and death, for science and money. We follow flowers and gardens from Egyptian tombs and the paradise gardens of the Middle Ages, via Dutch tulips and Linnaeus’s botany, to Monet’s water lilies, Japanese irises, Swedish garden idylls and the sunflower seeds of our own time.

• The gardens of antiquity
• The garden of paradise – medieval symbols
• Renaissance flowers – Botticelli, Leonardo and Dürer
• Tulips and vanitas – Dutch flower still lifes
• Botany and art – Merian, Linnaeus and Redouté
• Water lilies and sunflowers – Monet and van Gogh
• Birds and flowers, gardens of stone – China and Japan
• Nordic gardens and flowers
• Modern flowers – O’Keeffe, Warhol and Ai Weiwei